Agrichemical giant Syngenta faults EU bee plans

A beekeeper looks at one of his hive in Colomiers, southwestern France. Swiss-based agrichemical giant Syngenta on Friday urged Brussels to withdraw plans to restrict the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, saying blaming them for the death of bees was wrongheaded.

Swiss-based agrichemical giant Syngenta on Friday urged Brussels to withdraw plans to restrict the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, saying blaming them for the death of bees was wrongheaded.

Syngenta said that a European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report on the risks to bees posed by such pesticides was "fundamentally flawed".

"The European Commission has been using this flawed EFSA report to justify proposed restrictions on this technology," Syngenta's chief operating officer, John Atkin, said in a statement.

Further review has now shown that the EFSA based its assessment on "unrealistic and excessive" seed planting rates, between two and four times higher than would be used in modern agriculture, Syngenta said.

Syngenta—the top player on the global agrichemical market—said that using normal sowing rates in the study would have told a different story.

It claimed that the EFSA would have concluded that the risk to bees is extremely low and that in reality neonicotinoid technology does not damage their health.

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User comments

Well they would challenge the research. Its going to affect their profits and to be brutally frank they don't give a damn about the bees or anything else. Profit is everything.As for the research by the EFSA being flawed maybe they should explain the results of the Bayer research from 1996 which showed an accumulating effect of neonicotinoids in the soil with repeated use. Only for some bought and paid for minister to give it approval dismissing the findings totally. Seems to me the chemical industry is getting too big for its boots. Time they were closed down.

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